1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to radio frequency communication receivers, systems, and methods employing ultra wide bandwidth (UWB) signaling techniques. UWB is a term of art meaning that the signal bandwidth is equal to 25% or more of the center frequency. More particularly, the present invention relates to UWB communication transceivers, receivers, systems, and methods configured to perform fast synchronization on an incoming UWB signal.
2. Discussion of the Background
In UWB communication systems, a transmitter embeds data in a signal that can propagate in a desired medium so that a receiver at a distant location can then extract information from the incoming signal. The transmitter clock and the receiver clock are usually not initially synchronized. However, in order to accurately extract the information from the incoming signal, the receiver clock should be synchronized with the incoming (received) signal. Fast synchronization is desirable because the faster the receiver is synchronized with the incoming signal, the faster the receiver achieves an acceptable quality of service, the higher the average throughput, and the lower the latency in the communicated data.
Many radios have some type of synchronization, also referred to as clock recovery, incorporated into the receiver. In narrowband communication systems, synchronization typically takes place by locking onto a carrier signal that is a narrowband tone, which can be isolated with a narrow band-pass filter. This form of operation (i.e. correlating with a sine wave via a narrowband filter) generally cannot be done in UWB systems because they are purposely designed not to emit any tones. Instead they send noise-like code sequences that appear like noise and mimic noise in standard narrowband receivers. As a result, synchronization is accomplished by correlating with the noise-like code sequence that was transmitted. Since a programmable real-time filter whose impulse response is a matched filter to the noise-like code sequence is difficult to build, a sliding correlator is typically used to acquire and track the signal. The sliding correlator is built by applying the noise-like sequence into a mixer/multiplier (e.g. the local oscillator LO port) and applying the received signal into the other port (i.e. the RF port), integrating the mixer output signal over the duration of the known noise code, and collecting a string of values comprised of the integration values. If the frequency of the clock used at the transmitter to encode the data does not precisely match the receiver clock frequency, then the two sequences (i.e. that applied to the RF port, and that provided to the LO port) at the receiver “slide” in phase (or time) relative to one another. At some point in time, the string of correlation values will peak to the largest absolute value, indicating that the two sequences are time (or phase) aligned. As they continue to slide in phase, a repeating pattern will result that is the cyclic autocorrelation function of the noise-like code sequence. Because the output of the sliding correlator is cyclic, the process of moving the phase of the receiver relative to the transmitter through one cycle is often referred to as a “code wheel spin.” To guarantee that the largest absolute value of the correlation function is obtained, the code wheel must be allowed to spin at least one full cycle. In order to synchronize to the largest term, the receiver timing must have a mechanism to locate and then “lock onto” the largest peak by getting both the frequency and phase of its clock matched to the incoming signal. In the noiseless case, this mechanism can be simple and robust. But with real noise experienced by UWB receivers, the mechanism must be more complex and collect statistics in order to be robust.
Conventional UWB systems perform synchronization on an incoming signal modulated by pulse position modulation (PPM), where the temporal position of the pulses that constitute the incoming signal vary based on the data and the noise-like code sequence. Since the code sequence is long and spans many bits, and since the pulse repetition rate is slow (e.g. 10 MHz and lower), it takes a relatively long time to synchronize the receiver with the incoming signal.
UWB systems that use high chip rates (e.g. >1 GHz) to spread their spectrum, can cycle through a code of the same length much faster and thus synchronize faster. Nonetheless, the high sustained throughput requirements of newer applications such as streaming real-time video and multi-media in the context of multi-user networked systems gives rise to a need for faster synchronization so that more time is spent communicating data, and less time is spent synchronizing.
Most radios must operate in multipath environments. In multipath environments, more than one transmission path exists between the transmitter and receiver. Narrowband radios suffer in multipath environments due to the frequency selective nature of the phenomena. Narrowband radios can employ RAKE receiver structures to combine signals from the multiple paths, but this is a difficult and expensive process since narrowband systems lack the time-domain resolution to easily resolve the multipath terms.
By definition, UWB systems have high time-domain resolution, and thus can resolve the multipath signals. But the multipath signals lie within the modulation domain of UWB PPM systems, and the multipath environment can be unstable over the long coding periods of these systems.
High chip rate UWB systems have the advantage of operating in quasi-stationary multipath environments where the multipath is changing much slower than the code duration. In addition, UWB systems employing modulation schemes other than PPM do not as much difficulty with multipath corruption of the modulation. Such systems are better suited to cope with multipath environments.
The challenge, as recognized by the present inventors, is to perform fast synchronization so as to quickly obtain the best achievable signal quality, yet do it with high reliability and at a cost that is commensurate with extremely cost sensitive consumer electronics equipment.